


Recovery

by thedevilchicken



Category: Whitechapel (TV)
Genre: Angst with a Happy Ending, Bad Guys Made Them Do It, Caretaking, Developing Relationship, Hand injury, Hurt/Comfort, Implied/Referenced Homophobia, Injury Recovery, Kidnapping, M/M, Non-Consensual Blow Jobs, Past Rape/Non-con, Past Torture, Permanent Injury, Post-Canon, Shame, ToT: Chocolate Box, With A Twist
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-10-24
Updated: 2017-10-24
Packaged: 2019-01-22 15:17:00
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,707
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12484604
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thedevilchicken/pseuds/thedevilchicken
Summary: Joe is kidnapped and seriously injured; his recovery is difficult, and Kent is/isn't the best medicine.





	Recovery

**Author's Note:**

  * For [tunglo](https://archiveofourown.org/users/tunglo/gifts).



When Joe finally left the hospital, the team took it in turns trying to help. 

He protested that he didn't actually need any help but it was obvious to all concerned that he absolutely did, and not just because the doctors said so - there was virtually nothing he could do for himself at that point, considering the state that his hands were in. The next step was protesting that he could hire a temporary aide instead, but Miles gave him a withering, exasperated look as he drove him home after he'd been discharged, the sort that said there was no possibility that he'd stand for that. He grumbled something about him being their guvnor and that meaning he was their responsibility, though he was mostly muffled by Radio 1 at the time and Joe wasn't inclined to have him repeat himself over the top of Adele. Still, Joe suspected the idea of them helping him had more to do with feeling guilty than it did with their notional duty, but he didn't know quite how to say that out loud, even to himself, let alone to Miles. 

It wasn't that he blamed them for what had happened: quite to the contrary, he'd explained more than once exactly how extremely grateful he was that they'd found him, but their continued assistance was far more than he thought strictly necessary. He would have greatly preferred that they hadn't tried to help at all and just kept to the occasional visit instead, but in the end it seemed to be simpler to allow it than it would have been to argue with his stubborn DS - the best he managed to negotiate was that Buchan's help would be limited to portioning out his medication, which frankly suited them both, and was apparently suitable because of his civilian status. Then Miles suggested, his expression carefully neutral and his eyes firmly on the road, that they keep the arrangement just to him and Mansell and Riley only, but Joe told him not to worry. He really didn't mind if Kent took a turn, too, as long as Kent didn't mind it, either. Joe thought it would have seemed rather odd if he hadn't.

Primarily, he told himself, his objections were because he was their senior officer: he wasn't sure it was proper for them to help him quite so persistently, at least not in so many humiliating ways. But, were he honest with himself, he knew propriety really wasn't the issue, embarrassing as the situation undeniably was. Were he honest with himself, he quite simply didn't want anyone setting foot inside his home. At least not when he was in no condition to clean it when they'd left; the way his hands were, just opening the door to the flat was hard work enough. 

The first day, Miles was as respectful as he knew how to be regarding Joe's apparently well-known idiosyncrasies, but he left several hairs from the razor stuck to the basin of the sink when washing them away and his scrubbing of teacups left a lot to be desired. The next day, Riley's perfume lingered for hours after she'd left and he found pet hairs on the sofa cushions where she'd been sitting that he couldn't pick up to dispose of no matter how hard he tried. Mansell blustered in with his shoes still on the day after that, slung his rain-damp jacket onto the coffee table and left the towels on the bathroom floor when he was done, and that was just the tip of the iceberg where he was concerned. And then, on the fourth day following his awkward release from hospital on his team's recognizance, it was Kent's turn. He looked nervous when he arrived at the door. Joe supposed he understood, all things considered. 

"What do you need me to do?" he asked. So Joe told him, as straightforwardly as he could. He told himself needing help was nothing to be ashamed of. He told himself accepting help just meant there were people around him who cared.

Kent left his shoes on the rack by the door and put the guest slippers on when Joe asked him to. He did the washing up in a pair of brand new Marigolds from the cupboard underneath the sink and then washed the sink down afterwards, and he wore a pair of latex gloves from the box on the counter when he helped Joe out of his clothes to wash. He only touched him as much as he needed to, mostly with a soapy cloth or a clean white towel, and he blushed even more brightly than Joe did when the time inevitably came to steer the cloth over his abdomen and down to wash between his legs. Joe told himself needing help was nothing to be ashamed of. He told himself accepting Kent's help meant nothing at all. 

Mansell had avoided the area completely while he'd chattered on about something else - the rugby, the station's fantasy football league that he wasn't winning, last night's EastEnders. Riley had made a terrible joke that hadn't done much to put him at ease though it did at least seem to work for her, and Miles had been straightforward and even somewhat matronly about it. Kent, though, did it carefully. He soaped the cloth and he ran it over him, over his testicles and back over his perineum, over the length of his flaccid penis, and then he did it again to clean the soap away once he'd washed the cloth. He eased back Joe's foreskin and he gave the head underneath it a careful rub, and Joe took a slow breath in a vain attempt to steady himself as he told himself that none of it was intended to be sexual. Not remotely. Kent was helping him. He was just a lot more thorough about it than the others had been. He was more anxious to do a good job.

Afterwards, Kent helped him to dress, and after that Kent spread butter on some toast, made him a cup of tea and left him to it. Joe felt knocked so far off-balance by then that he forgot to thank him for his help before he left. He was so off-balance that it didn't occur to him to mind Kent being in his flat until he was gone, and not just because he'd been so careful and respectful, and quiet and neat and clean. The next morning, when Miles came in to take his turn, he actually found himself looking forward to it being Kent's again. He hadn't expected that at all.

When Kent came back four days later, after Miles and Riley and Mansell had all been back to take their turns, it unfolded just like the first time had. He helped Joe wash his hair bent over the bathroom sink, his latex-gloved hands massaging the shampoo in and out. He helped him shave, tilting his chin with his thumb when he needed him to move this way or that, occasionally meeting Joe's gaze with a nervous smile. He helped him brush his teeth and take off his clothes. He picked up the cloth and dipped it into the hot water he'd run into the sink while Joe positioned himself in the centre of a towel and he washed him, starting between his shoulderblades and sweeping down. It really shouldn't have felt pleasant - it shouldn't have been anything except for necessary - but it _did_ feel pleasant, the cloth against his skin, the pressure and warmth of Kent's hands...it wasn't like Miles or Riley. It definitely wasn't like Mansell. 

Kent dropped into a crouch to run the cloth over Joe's right leg. He looked up at him as Joe looked down, and he glanced away again quickly but Joe saw the way he looked. It twisted his insides into knots. It made his face feel warm and his limbs feel cold and his chest feel tight because it really couldn't not remind him of somewhere else and something else entirely. He wished it hadn't, but he could tell they'd both thought of precisely the same thing.

Kent finished what he was doing and he left without further incident, but even the insufferable drone of daytime television couldn't take Joe's mind off what had happened, that look on Kent's face or Kent's gloved hands on his skin. He could feel the ghost of Kent's fingers on his neck, over his collarbones, at his hips, around his cock. He told himself that his subsequent physical reaction while he sat there with his recollections was inevitable, but he knew that wasn't exactly true. It seemed almost fitting that he couldn't use his hands to take care of it. It wouldn't have felt quite right somehow, for so very many different reasons.

Mercifully, it was Miles's turn again the next day, with a quick round of cheese on toast before he was off again to the station, but it was only the briefest reprieve. When Joe opened the door on Saturday morning, it was Kent again, dressed in jeans, and it took Joe a surprised second or two to recall that he likely wasn't on duty and that the station's dress code hadn't relaxed quite that far in his absence. Kent explained that Riley had had other plans come up at the last minute, so he'd stepped in instead. Joe nodded. It seemed like a very helpful, team-minded thing to do. 

The issue was, he found himself with an unanticipated and very much unwanted erection when Kent started to wash him. He apologised, and Kent just smiled awkwardly as he blushed bright red and told him it was fine, it happened, like if you try not to think about pink elephants or something like that. He said he got it. Joe wasn't at all sure that he did. 

"I bet it happens all the time with Mansell and the skipper," Kent said, trying to make light of it, and Joe just smiled awkwardly as if in some manner of agreement. But he didn't agree. It didn't happen with the others. He didn't feel that it was likely to.

He had the staples taken out by a community nurse a couple of days later, once Kent had left after another embarrassing reaction, not that that meant his hands were actually healed by any stretch of the imagination. She helped him into his new braces before she left again, that had been fitted at the hospital before he'd left; Mansell said they looked snazzy and Riley told him he'd be out of them soon, and Miles said his hands would probably be ugly as sin but at least he still had both of them, which Joe thought was refreshingly pragmatic of him. But the next time Kent arrived at Joe's flat, he just tried not to stare. Joe's somewhat less than entirely unexpected erection during the washing phase almost seemed like a welcome distraction from the fact that Kent's gaze was averted from his hands and then attracted back again with even greater frequently than normal. It was _almost_ a welcome distraction, except for the images it conjured: Kent on his knees, his mouth around Joe's cock. Still, what he wanted most was to clear the air between them, except that seemed increasingly impossible.

Kent was back again four days later. One of Joe's braces had come loose overnight and Kent helped him to put it straight, looking green around the gills at the state of Joe's hands as he did so. Joe knew how they looked underneath the braces, but he tried not to dwell on it. The surgery to try to fix the bones and the muscles and the nerves around them had left almost as much scarring as the initial injuries had themselves. Miles was right: he _was_ lucky he hadn't lost them.

"I'm sorry," Kent said, and Joe didn't have to ask what he was sorry for, but the thought of it jabbed at him. He almost wanted to reach out and squeeze Kent's shoulder and tell him it was fine, more because it really wasn't his fault than because it really was fine. He almost wanted to reach out and brush the backs of his scarred fingers against Kent's cheek or his neck or his hair, a thought that struck him as absurd except perhaps it would have shown Kent that his hands weren't completely useless. He didn't do it. He physically _couldn't_ do it. He smiled tightly instead and told him again that it wasn't his fault, as if perhaps this time he'd listen, though it sounded like a platitude to him as well. 

"Would you like a cup of tea?" Joe asked him, after he was dressed again, in tracksuit bottoms Riley had bought for him that were just a bit too big and a bit too short and a t-shirt he'd worn more often since leaving hospital than in the entirety of the two years previous. 

Kent frowned. "I can make you one before I go, if you like," he said.

"That really wasn't meant to be a hint," Joe said, mildly, then he glanced down at his hands strapped into their braces. "Yes, I know you'd have to make the tea, but I thought we could have a conversation."

"The skipper says we shouldn't discuss work with you," Kent said, eyeing him very close to suspiciously. 

"I'm not asking you to discuss work."

"I'm sorry, Guv, I don't know what you're asking." 

"Have a drink with me." 

"You're kidding."

"Why would I be kidding?"

"Look, I've got to go."

"Kent..."

But Kent made a sudden beeline for the door, pulled on his boots with the laces tipped inside and not even close to tied, and exited the flat before Joe could conjure up with much of an argument to the contrary. He called himself an idiot underneath his breath as the door slammed shut. He had no idea what he was doing. He was all at sea.

Kent drove him to his checkup at the hospital four days after that, because it was his day to help. He arrived early to help Joe wash as usual, then helped him pull on jeans and a polo shirt and a pair of trainers that he usually used for jogging, or at least he had before the kidnapping, because that was ten times easier to arrange than his suit and shoes. He hadn't left the flat since he'd come home from the hospital. He didn't particularly want to leave it then, either, but Kent was a surprisingly good coach. He seemed to understand. Perhaps he did.

"Your partner doesn't have to leave," the consultant said, when Kent turned to leave the room once Joe's name had been called. Kent's eyes went wide as he paused and turned back in the doorway, looking at him like all his secret desires had been exposed, but Joe already knew about them. Joe had been wondering what to do about them.

"I'll see you afterwards," Joe said, and Kent nodded tightly then turned and left. And afterwards, Kent drove him home in complete silence. He unlocked the door for him. When Joe went inside, he lingered there, just inside the door, barely over the threshold. 

"You didn't correct her," Kent said, once he'd come inside, shed his shoes and crouched down to untie Joe's laces, since he was still far from able to do so himself. 

"I'm sorry if it embarrassed you," Joe replied. "That wasn't my intention. I apologise." 

Kent said nothing else as he helped him take off his shoes then change his clothes, but the look on his face said he doubted what he'd just been told, or at least that he wondered what Joe's intention really was if not that. 

Four days later, he was back again. And once they were done with the usual routine, Joe paused. 

"Could you help me wash my hands?" he asked. 

Kent looked at him. He chewed on the inside of his lip and then nodded. They went back into the bathroom, and Kent reached for a pair of gloves from the box on the counter.

"You don't have to wear those," Joe told him, as he was putting them on, not entirely sure where the sentiment had sprung from, and Kent looked at him for a moment like he wasn't quite sure if he meant what he thought he meant. Then he slowly peeled the gloves back off, tucked them together and put them in the bathroom bin. He washed his hands, carefully, like he was following the steps on the sign over the sink that Joe had stared at for hours while the morphine wore off in his hospital room, one hand over the other, circling wrists and thumbs. Then he took Joe's hands and he eased them under the hot tap and he soaped them with handwash, slowly, his fingertips following scars, rubbing at Joe's palms.

Joe watched him do it. He watched Kent's hands on his at first, warm and firm but careful, then he watched his face, his brows drawing together in something that seemed close to concentration but then again perhaps it wasn't. He ran his hands over Joe's wrists, between his fingers, across his knuckles, clenching his jaw as he did so, and it hit Joe unexpectedly, the intimacy of it, Kent's thumbs brushing his wrists, his fingers laced with his. No one except the usual medical professionals had touched his hands since he'd been admitted, and they certainly hadn't touched him like that. He'd never particularly liked to be touched, truth be told, but Kent's bare skin on his seemed strangely contrary to expectations. He didn't mind it. He actually _liked_ it. It occurred to him in a sudden flash that he might have liked to feel more of Kent's skin on his. He snatched his hands away.

"Did that hurt?" Kent asked, evidently concerned, as he searched Joe's hands for signs it had.

Joe shook his head and reached his hands back out to him again. "No," he said. "I was just thinking about something else." And it was meant to be reassuring but from the way Kent blanched, he knew he'd said exactly the wrong thing. It was too late, he couldn't take it back.

Four days later, he was back again, and Kent was on his knees when the inevitable happened. Joe winced at himself because it seemed no amount of dredging up the face of his old Classics teacher or reciting Keats inside his head could keep his body from reacting to Kent's hands.

Kent turned his head and for a start Joe actually believed that it was accidental when his cheek with its five o'clock shadow brushed against the side of his stiff cock. But then Kent's mouth was against him, and one of Kent's gloved hands was on him. Kent licked his lips and pressed them to the tip of Joe's cock and then he pushed it in past them, the tip of his tongue moving over him, and Joe stared down, completely agog. He watched him mutely for at least a few more seconds after that, rendered speechless, before he finally managed to clear his throat and say Kent's name out loud.

Kent pulled back. He sat back on his heels and looked up at Joe with a red face and very pink lips.

"You don't have to do that," Joe told him. "I thought we agreed that this is just a normal physiological response."

"Yes, but." Kent looked confused and frustrated and also faintly stricken as he sat there. "I just thought maybe..." He made a vague kind of gesture with his hands that seemed to mean very little and then trailed off and frankly, Joe had no idea how to respond, so he didn't say a word. Kent stood, his gaze averted, and after a moment's pause, he carried on and helped him dress. Joe just couldn't fathom out a way to say he hadn't meant he wanted him to stop, just that he knew they should.

He started physio a few days later, trying to make his reconstituted fingers - that he knew were almost as much metal as they were bone - move a fraction more each day. One of the team took him there and back for the first few weeks but after that he started to insist he get a taxi there and back, though everything took so much longer than he would have liked without one of them there to help. On the bad days he couldn't get his clothes off afterwards, let alone dress himself again once he had, so he called Kent, because Kent had told him to callif he needed him. He was the first number in the speed dial for his landline with its huge-buttoned new phone that Kent had puzzled over while he'd programmed it, so all he had to do was press a few buttons and put him on speaker. And every time that Kent arrived, it even seemed like he didn't mind being called to be there. It seemed like he was almost pleased.

Sometimes he stayed for a few minutes after they'd finished. Sometimes they talked about casesthat the team was working on, in spite of Miles's understandable embargo. Sometimes, as time went by, as weeks went by, Joe made their cups of tea himself while Kent sat watching, waiting to spring in if things went at all awry. He didn't mind Kent's socks on the sofa cushions when he pulled himself up to sit cross-legged. He didn't mind the way Kent looked at him, or the way their conversations tended to meander. He didn't mind walking together when he needed some fresh air or Sunday afternoons at the café downt he street that understood he didn't mean offence when he ordered his coffee in a takeaway cup for cleanliness reasons even though they were drinking in. But it couldn't last.

When he could finally do enough to take care of himself without assistance, Joe was glad but disappointed, and not just because he knew he'd never be the same as before. It had become clear that he could never go back to his job as it had been. It had become clear that complete recovery would never be achieved. They didn't talk about it, but Kent couldn't have been unaware. 

The higher-ups offered him a desk job and he took it; it was meant to be temporary, or at least that was what they said, but he knew it wouldn't be. Over the weeks and months that followed, the team were thrown into a case and they slowly stopped phoning, and stopped texting, and stopped coming to his flat, and he had to admit that he found it difficult to keep in touch with them himself now they weren't a team. Sometimes he saw them at the station but all they did was exchange pleasantries while they tried not to stare at his hands, and eventually, one by one, they moved on: Mansell transferred to another borough, Miles retired and Riley moved to Dorset, for some incomprehensible reason. The only one left there in Whitechapel was Kent, if you didn't count Buchan who he arranged to meet once a fortnight to talk through his next book. Their paths didn't often cross. Joe regretted that.

After months of vague smiles across the canteen and brief hellos in corridors, he saw Kent across the car park one night after work he and raised one scarred hand to wave. Kent winced as much as he smiled when he waved back and it abruptly knocked the wind right out of Joe. He got into the taxi instead of stopping to make awkward small talk as he might have wanted to, three seconds before. He hadn't realised how much he'd missed Kent's good opinion of him. He hadn't realised how much he'd missed _him_.

It was almost midnight when the doorbell rang and Joe quickly made up his mind not to answer it, except it rang again, and again, and again. It was Kent when he got there, looking drained, looking tired, looking anywhere but straight at him. That was likely just as well, considering Joe's barefoot, shirtless state.

"I'm sorry," Kent said. 

"For what?" Joe replied.

"For earlier. The way I looked at you. It's just..."

"It's fine," Joe said, smiling wryly, and he tucked his hands behind his back. "I'm not an idiot, Kent. I know my hands aren't particularly pretty. I usually try to wear gloves when I leave the station but I must have left them in my office." 

Kent paused. He scrunched up his face for a moment, unreadably. "It's not that," he said. 

"Then what is it?"

"I'm sorry." 

"I know."

"It was my fault."

"You know I've never thought it was."

"I didn't want to do it." 

"And I've never thought you did." 

"But I hurt you." 

Joe lifted his hands, all scars over pins that held the parts together. He looked at them for a moment, then he cupped Kent's prickly jaw with them. 

"You saved my life," Joe said. 

"You mean I ruined it." He had a bitter twist to his lips that Joe didn't like at all.

"I mean you _saved_ it." He sighed. He dropped his hands back to his sides again. "Would you come inside? I think we need to talk." 

"I should go." 

"Please don't."

"I'm sorry." And Kent turned and hurried away, his hands jammed into his pockets. Joe let him go. Once he'd closed the door, he regretted it, but by then he supposed it was too late for him to don shirt and shoes and follow. 

When he went back to bed, when he went back to sleep, he dreamed a gun to his head and a crowbar in Kent's hands. In the dream, Kent did what he had to do to keep him living when they said _it's his hands or his head_ , but that wasn't only dreaming; Joe wasn't the only one who'd been kidnapped. The two of them had been taken together.

He texted Kent the next morning to ask him to meet, but he didn't respond. He left a voicemail message on his phone that night and it went unanswered, too. He tried again the next day, and what he told himself was one last time the next. But then, on the fourth day, he walked out into the station car park after he'd finished for the day and there was Kent, leaning against the side of the waiting taxi. 

"I thought you were ignoring me," Joe said. 

Kent smiled wryly, self-deprecatingly, maybe faintly sheepishly. "I was," he replied, rubbing the back of his neck. 

"And now?"

"Now I'm not." 

"What changed your mind?"

Kent shrugged his shoulders. "I thought if you were trying to get back at me for what I did, I should stop trying to avoid it."

"And if it's not that?"

"Then let's just say I'll be surprised."

Joe shook his head with an exasperated smile. "I think we need to have a conversation about that," he said. "Would you follow me home? I'll make tea."

Kent agreed. He followed Joe's taxi in his car; he followed Joe up to his flat; he followed him inside.

"Will you help me get changed?" Joe asked when they got there, and Kent followed him into the bedroom without question or objection. He did exactly as he'd done each time he'd helped before, as if he'd switched to automatic: he unbuttoned Joe's jacket and slipped it back from his shoulders, unbuttoned his waistcoat, untied his tie. He unbuckled his belt, unzipped his fly, stripped him out of trousers and socks and even underwear because he obviously knew from experience that when Joe changed clothes after being out, he preferred to change them all. 

Except the truth was Joe really didn't need his help, not any longer. Perhaps buttoning and unbuttoning took him more time than it ever had before, but he could do it; once Joe was standing there naked by the foot of his bed, Kent seemed to realise that. He frowned. Joe stepped forward, wondering if he'd made a terrible mistake. 

He unbuckled Kent's belt, concentrating on it so he wouldn't think too much about the way that he was already blushing. He pushed Kent's trousers down over his hips. He pushed down his underwear. He glanced at Kent, at his eyes, at the deer-in-headlights expression on his face, and then he went down on his knees on the floor in front of him. He wrapped one hand around Kent's cock.

"Guv..." Kent said, with a look that said he really didn't understand, even as Joe felt his cock begin to stiffen in his hand.

"I'm not your guvnor, Kent," Joe told him. "I haven't been for some time now."

"You still don't have to do that, though."

"I know," he said. "I want to." And he stroked him slowly, base to tip, shifting his foreskin up over the head and back again the way he liked himself. Judging from Kent's reaction, he liked it, too. "Do you want me to stop?"

Kent gave him a look like he wondered if that was some kind of trick question, like it was a trap, like he was trying to trip him up and make him say something he could hold against him. Joe took a deep breath, licked his lips and pressed his mouth to the side of the head of Kent's cock. He sucked there, slowly, lightly, feeling his own cock stir in interest in response. Then he sat back on his heels and he looked up at him, his hands resting on his thighs.

"Do you want me to stop?" Joe asked again.

Kent shook his head tightly, wide-eyed. "No," he said. So Joe leaned back in, wrapped one hand around the base of him and took him straight into his mouth.

Of course, the problem was that the entire time he did it he was trying not to think about exactly what he assumed Kent was thinking about, too: that first night when they'd been kidnapped. They'd been bundled into a van at gunpoint, pistol-whipped to keep them quiet and cuffed to each other so they couldn't run, then dumped in a dank cellar room somewhere under what turned out to be a mouldering old house. They sat in the pitch dark against a damp wall, trying to keep themselves calm, and it was hours before the kidnappers came back in and turned the light on, a bare bulb hanging from the beams. It stung Joe's eyes, but he knew that was the very least of their worries.

The pair of kidnappers had been working their way through the local gay scene with a handgun and twisted enthusiasm, and Joe had been the one to catch the case. He'd seen the photos of the things they'd done and he'd examined most of the bodies in the mortuary, so he knew it didn't bode well for them, either him or Kent. And he'd told the story of what had happened to his hands to various people at various times after their rescue, in his bed in the hospital, at the station, at the inquiry, at the kidnappers' trial, but that had been the second night before they'd been located on the third. He'd never talked about the first night. As far as he knew, neither had Kent. 

The kidnappers had pulled Joe up and handcuffed him to a dining chair. They pulled down his trousers and his underwear, laughing, making jokes, jostling each other, then they ruffled Kent's hair and pushed him down in front of him, on his knees on the damp floor. They told him to blow him, _all coppers are queer, right?_ , and Kent looked up at Joe as one of them cocked the gun. They put it to Kent's head. 

"It's his head or yours," said the one with the gun, highly amused by his terrible pun, and Kent looked at Joe with clearly no idea what to do. Joe believed, truly believed, that they would shoot Kent if he failed to comply, because he'd seen the things they'd done. So he nodded at him tensely.

"It's fine," Joe said, quietly, leaning down as far and close as he could with his hands cuffed behind the chair, so that they couldn't hear him. "It's just the two of us. Forget about them, just concentrate on me."

So, Kent shuffled in close and stroked him till he was hard, and then he put his mouth on him. It really could have been just the two of them, Joe had thought when he closed his eyes, when he tilted his head back to rest against the chair, when Kent's hands were on his thighs and his mouth was all around him and his tongue teased at the tip, but Kent sucked him till he came and one of them pushed his head down, making him gag on Joe's cock till he swallowed like that was the height of wit and hilarity. Then they left them locked up again in the dark, Joe's trousers still down around his knees. Kent helped him pull them back up, apologising all the while. Joe tried to tell him he had nothing to apologise for, but he adamantly didn't listen.

It was the next night when they'd lashed Joe's hands to the splintery table and thrown the crowbar down in front of Kent. Joe couldn't recall much from after Kent did it but he could remember before: while Kent begged them to let him take his place, Joe was thinking through their options. The problem was he hadn't been able to think of any kind of way out of it without one of them ending up sprawled dead on the cellar floor, so he told him _do it_ , and he meant it, hoping it would keep them both alive a few hours longer. Maybe long enough so they could both be found.

He couldn't recall much from after that except shouting himself hoarse until he finally lost consciousness and how the tears made the blood spatter run down Kent's face to his jaw in haphazard lines, collecting sickly pink in his collar or dripping onto his dirty white shirt. He couldn't remember much but afterwards, in the hospital, Miles had told him that once armed response had broken in and found them, Kent had picked the crowbar back up and shattered one of the kidnappers' jaws with it. Mansell said it couldn't have happened to a nicer fella and honestly, Joe couldn't have said he disagreed, considering. But in all the time he was in hospital, Kent was the only one that hadn't visited. He was the only one Joe had wanted to see.

Kent pulled back, stepped back, his cock still hard and wet from Joe's mouth. He raised his arms and tugged at his own hair as he stood there, mostly dressed but exposed, as if he wondered why he'd stopped it. Joe just knelt where he was, his breath coming quickly, his face flushed hot. He watched him.

"I don't understand any of this," Kent said. 

"I don't know how to make it any clearer," Joe replied. "I understand if you're not interested, but I honestly thought you were."

"And I thought you weren't."

"I was," Joe told him. "I am."

"In me?"

Joe smiled faintly. "Yes," he said. "In you."

Honestly, though, he knew he hadn't been until they'd been taken. He'd never really thought of Kent as anything more than a colleague, as a junior officer, until he'd seen the look on his face at the things that he'd been told to do, but after that, Joe had thought about it. He'd lain in his hospital bed, drifting in and out through a haze of morphine, and he'd thought about what Kent had done and what Kent had been willing to let him do instead. Initially, he'd just wanted to thank him rather profusely, but the thoughts that had stirred up in him after that, once he'd worked out the whys and the wherefores of Kent's actions, had been nothing close to thank yous. He'd been surprised at himself, thinking that way about a subordinate, but enough time had passed since then that he really wasn't any longer.

He stood. He rested his hands at Kent's shoulders.

"What can I do to convince you?" he asked. "Do you want to go to bed with me?"

Kent practically gawped. "Yes, but not to prove a point!" he replied.

"Then what?"

Kent shrugged again and Joe stepped forward, quickly and impulsively. He pressed his mouth to Kent's, briefly, awkwardly, but he could feel a blush spread across his cheeks that matched Kent's when he stepped back again. Kent looked stunned, speechless, so Joe did it again, slower, almost like he knew what he was doing though he felt his lack of any real experience quite acutely. He took Kent's hands in his and he he leaned down and kissed him. To his relief and surprise, bafflement and overwhelming wonder, Kent tentatively wrapped his arms around Joe's waist and kissed him back.

They probably should have stopped at that, but they didn't. Joe started to push the jacket from Kent's shoulders and Kent paused just for a second then he helped him do it. Joe unbuttoned Kent's shirt while Kent pulled off his tie, almost falling over each other's hands to do it, too quickly for it to be controlled. Kent stood on one foot then the other to pull off his socks and almost tripped himself up and he laughed, breathlessly, nervously, self-consciously, as Joe just looked at him; Kent straightened up, naked, rubbed his mouth but let him look.

"Come to bed," Joe said, anxiously, as if he couldn't predict what his reaction would be, but to his relief, Kent nodded. They went to bed.

Joe's hands could support his weight but he wasn't entirely sure how long that would last so once Kent had lain down on the bed - _Joe's_ bed, which seemed disconcertingly fine to his unpredictable brain, he shuffled up over him and went down onto his forearms. He was pressed to him from mid-chest down, his cock caught against Kent's flat abdomen, and Kent looked at him, almost incredulous, his hands resting lightly at the middle of Joe's back. He pulled his knees up with his feet flat to the mattress, the insides of his thighs pressed to Joe's hips. They must have looked liked lovers like that, Joe thought.

"Are we really doing this, Guv?" Kent asked, his hands moving down, slowly, to trace the dimples at the small of Joe's back. 

Joe huffed, amused. "I think it's safe to say we are," he replied. "But you might want to call me _Joe_ from this point on."

In the end, after some shuffling around, they found the easiest way to proceed was with Kent down on his hands and knees. Joe couldn't honestly have said that he'd expected to be having sex at any point in his immediate future and so his flat wasn't exactly awash with the required paraphernalia, but Kent said he'd been carrying a condom in his wallet in case of emergency so that was fine; Joe didn't ask what kind of emergency would require a prophylactic, which was probably for the best. There was hand lotion in a pump-top bottle by the bed, which Joe actually had been using on his hands, but that seemed to be the best of available options and when Kent knelt, when he went down onto his hands and then bent lower, resting his head against his forearms, Joe rubbed a generous amount between his cheeks, against the hole between them, with one very unsteady hand. He fumbled with the condom, his fingers slick from the lotion and not too finely dexterous at the best of times, and when he laughed at himself, Kent shuffled back around with a blush that spread right down his neck and helped him to roll it on. He smiled nervously. Joe, just as nervously, leaned in to press his mouth to his.

"Are you seeing anyone?" Joe asked, when he pulled back again, though it seemed perhaps the oddest timing for it. 

Kent shook his head as he was slicking Joe with lotion. "No, not at the moment," he replied. "Honestly, not for months."

"Would you like to see me?" Joe asked. 

Kent smiled. He nodded. His gaze flickered up to Joe's. "I'd like that a lot," he replied. Joe frankly hadn't realised just how pleased he'd be by that.

Kent turned back around and Joe shuffled forward on his knees to guide the tip of his cock down between Kent's cheeks. His stomach clenched. His throat was tight. And when he pushed forward, when he pushed into him, slowly, pausing, pulling out to readjust then push back in a fraction deeper, Kent made a muffled sound of pleasure against the crook of his arm. Joe pushed the last inch or so into him in one quicker thrust and Kent made that sound again; it made Joe feel oddly warm, oddly giddy, knowing he was doing that to him, though he'd probably have been embarrassed to sound like that himself. Then again, he supposed he might he liked being less than silent with Kent. To his surprise, he felt quite willing to find out.

He ran his hands over Kent's thighs and his hips to his waist as he shifted against him, his eyes on the scars against Kent's smooth skin. He rubbed with his thumbs as he held him there, as he shifted his hips with a fraction more force, feeling him pull tight around the length of him. He'd rarely felt at ease enough with anyone to fumble his way through sex before the kidnapping, let alone after it, and perhaps experience was consequently not his strong suit, but Kent moved, just a little, pushing back against him as if not quite of his own accord, and Joe could only take that as a good sign. 

He'd thought about sex since that time, of course; perhaps he'd never thought his libido to be particularly active but the thoughts were inevitable, while his hands had been unavailable to him and then again once sufficient faculty had returned. Every time he'd slipped his hand down under his pyjamas in bed at night or felt that particular urge under the shower, he'd thought about Kent; he'd thought about Kent's mouth on him, about the shape of his body underneath his suit, his hands, the look on his face as he'd resigned himself and swung the crowbar at Joe's hands to save his life. He hadn't realised in what manner Kent had viewed him until then, though he supposed Miles had tried to tell him more than once. He hadn't realised how his interest would be piqued or just what the ordeal would do to Kent. Now there they were.

He reached down and wrapped one hand around Kent's cock as he moved in him. He stroked him, his other hand gripping tight at his hip, his own hips flexing hard, and it was heady, and the air felt too warm, and Kent groaned as his entire body seemed to tighten and he came, suddenly, over Joe's hand. Perhaps ordinarily he would have felt repulsed by that, but Joe bit his lip as his hips stuttered in response; he bucked against him, harder, his movements tight as the feeling of it clawed at him and he gasped, almost vocally, as he pushed in deep one final time and came in him. He rubbed Kent's hips. He pulled out and wrapped the condom in a truly excessive number of tissues before placing it into the bin. Then he stretched out on his back as Kent settled down onto his front, his head turned to him, pillowed on his arms.

"You want to have a shower now, right?" Kent said, amusement playing at the corners of his mouth. It wasn't really a question, though, so Joe didn't answer; he smiled, perhaps a shade away from sheepishly. Kent didn't seem to mind at all. He sat himself up. "We should probably wash the sheets as well," he said, rather like he'd read Joe's mind, so they stripped the bed and then Joe turned on the shower.

It would have been much more efficient to take it in turns but Joe didn't seem to be overly concerned with efficiency. He pulled Kent in with him, the space more than big enough for both of them, and Kent reached for a flannel. Joe let him wash him, just like he had before except under the jets of the shower, and then Joe took a turn. Kent let Joe wash his hair, let him touch his scarred hands to every last part of him, finding the ticklish places, finding the places that made him smile or blush. He had a lot left to learn, but he couldn't help but think the study he'd make wouldn't be particulary onerous.

And then, once they were clean and dry and mostly clothed, though Kent's borrowed t-shirt and jogging bottoms seemed just a little oversized, Kent reached for Joe's hands. Joe let him take them. He let him press his mouth to each palm in turn, then rest his forehead down against Joe's collarbone. Joe wrapped his arms around him. He didn't need to say a word.

What Kent had done that night had saved him, Joe thought, and Kent's recovery after the fact had been just as incomplete as his was. It had never been Kent's fault, except inside his head.

His hands found Kent's, and squeezed, and made him smile with it.

Even if Kent never really understood, Joe knew whatever time he spent with him would not be wasted. But maybe they could recover together.


End file.
